Welcome to the Home Poker forum on the 2+2 poker website. Please read this entire sticky, especially before you post. If you have any questions or need something, feel free to PM the mods of this forum.

READ BEFORE YOU POST!

Finding Players or Games
DO NOT post about any online game, whether or not it is called "Home Poker."

Additional Guidelines
The other guidelines for posting here are simple. We try to take a very liberal view on acceptable topics in this forum, provided it is related to home poker games in some way.

While home games often have a bit of fun trash-talking, we try to keep the tone friendly and supportive. Do not write something overtly offensive or blatantly trollish that wouldn't be tolerated if we were all sitting around a poker table in a home game.

While we don't mind threads about general poker strategy, probability, basic rules of the games themselves, there are other forums for that which might give you a better response.

Product and company reviews are encouraged when the products or services sold are related to home poker. When posting a review, please try to provide as much relevant, factual information as possible. Avoid rants, axe-grinding, and posting old/outdated information. If you are a vendor, you are permitted to respond to reviews as long as you adhere to the vendor guidelines listed below.

Vendors
2+2 allows most vendors to post on our forums without advertising with us. However, they need to verify their account with us and post within some very narrow restrictions:

You cannot post at all until you get approval as a site representative.

No site name, portion of site name, or initials are allowed in your screen name.

No site logo in your avatar.

No promotional posts of any kind are permitted unless you have an advertising/sponsorship agreement with 2+2.

You cannot start your own support thread; you can only reply in existing threads to direct questions that aren’t promotional in nature.

Violations of the promotional post rule, including having friends/shills lob out fake questions, will be dealt with harshly.

If you want to find people to play in a legal home game that you host, or if you are looking for a local home game, visit the Home Game Listings sub-forum. Use the search function to find threads already started for your area.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) and Helpful Links
There is a wealth of good (and bad) advice in this forum. Here are some links to threads you might find useful, as well as links to other websites that have been recommended by posters to Home Poker.

How to set up a tournament
There are several great resources for structuring a poker tournament.

First, check out BlindValet.com. It's a great tool for setting up blinds, stack sizes, and includes a clock for running your tournament.

Second, 2+2 poster PFAPFAP created a great cheat sheet for structuring tournaments. Click the images below for a larger version.

On the first page you choose your stack size and the length of your blind rounds. You do this based on what you already should know: how many players you have, and how long you want the tournament to last. For each combination of these, there are three choices of stacks and lengths.

This is a great starting point, but you can tweak this as you like. If you add more chips than recommended, of course your tournament will run a little longer. For example, with the same blind lengths, going from 4K to 5K might add one or two blind levels.

The next page is the blind structure, which is the same for every tournament. They are the ones used in the WSOP.

Third, as already mentioned above, HomePokerTourney.com has a lot of advice about poker tournaments, but I think the two options above are superior for tournament structure.

Poker chips are a common topic on this forum. This post contains some basic information about poker chips, to help get people up to speed. Read through this, check out some of the links, and if you still have questions, either add a comment to the threads linked below, or start your own thread with your question.

You should ignore many of the claims made by those who sell poker chips. Terms like "clay" are widely misused. All chips are mostly made of some sort of polymer or resin. It is the type of polymer, additional ingredients, and the method of manufacture which differentiates poker chips. There are three main categories of poker chips construction:

Injection Molded: These are commonly called plastic chips. They may be all plastic and very light, or contain a metal slug to give them weight. Although disdained by chip-aholics, they do the job and are beloved by some.

Compression Molded: These are often called clay chips, though the amount of earthen material is only a fraction of the material used, and can vary greatly. These are the most common type of casino poker chips. They weigh around 9 to 10 grams each. These are the most expensive chips on the market.

Injecto-compression: An injection molding process that provides a denser chip than regular injection molding. These have more of a plastic feel than true compression molded chips, but achieve casino weight without the use of a metal insert. Sometimes called "China clays," they are a popular compromise between the cheapest injection molded chips and the most expensive compression molded chips.

Ceramic: While they are not made of true ceramic, these chips have a ceramic feel and sound, and are the same weight as compression molded chips, without using a metal insert. They also provide a full chip surface for graphics.

Chip Weight
Clay casino chips for decades have been roughly 8-10g. Paulson, BCC, and ASM all manufacture compression molded chips of approximately that weight.

Injection-molded chips would be much lighter and feel "cheap" by comparison, so manufacturers include a metal slug to bring the weight up. Slugged chips are often promoted as "casino weight", which is simply marketing bafflegab.

Slugged chips generally weigh 11g and up, and have a characteristic metallic sound when handled. Needless to say, poker chip aficionados do not covet this sound. You don't need your chips to weigh 13g+, and the best chips weigh less than that.

Older Paulson chips used small amounts of lead to add heft, and might not be particularly safe to handle regularly. All modern clay chips are lead-free. Most ASM chips contain brass flakes, which are easily visible in the edges of the chips.

DENOMINATIONS AND COLORS
Whether you get denominated or non-denominated chips, you need to get the right chips for your game to play optimally.

When deciding what values your chips should represent, keep in mind the rule that each chip should be worth four or five times the next smallest chip. Standard chip values for US currency are .01, .05, .25, 1, 5, 25, 100, 500, 1000, 5000, 25000, and 100000. There is no need to buy any other denominations, like .10, .50, or 10 chips. 20 chips can be used instead of 25 chips, if that is your preference.

If you buy ready-made, denominated chips, your color choices are already set. But if you buy non-denominated chips, or order custom chips, you will need to decide what color to use for each value. In a few areas, notably California, chip colors vary from casino to casino. However in some areas, notably Las Vegas and Atlantic City, some colors are standardized by law.

The standards get looser outside those values, but gold, yellow or orange is common for 1000.

Some people feel strongly that the standard colors should be used to avoid confusion, that they provide for quicker and more accurate betting. Others feel strongly that it is their own damn set, they should do as they like -- that's the whole point of custom chips. Whatever you decide, it is reasonable to avoid using standard colors for non-standard values. For example, don't use red for 1s, because red is almost universally used for 5s. This is especially true if your chips don't have denominations printed on them.

CHOOSING QUANTITIES
The poker chips you give each person is generally made up of three denominations, and depend on the stakes that you are playing. There is the small blind or ante chip, the betting chip, and the large chip. So for .25/.50 blinds, you would use .25, 1, and 5 chips. For 1/2, use 1, 5, and 25 chips.

Here is how I handle buy-ins for our .25/.50 game with $50 buy-ins. I use racks, which means you do not have to count anything except for the 5.00 chips. If you have different buy-in amounts, adjust these quantities by adding or removing 5.00 chips.

Buy-in #

.25

1.00

5.00

1-5

20

20

5

6-10

0

20

6

11 +

0

0

8

On the other hand, some people like to use large stacks of chips for that "big game" feel. That means using more small chips. Consider this when deciding on quantities.

Lastly, tournaments can require you to color up, so you need larger denomination chips to allow for that.

From these guidelines, you can make up a set of poker chips that fit your needs. Multiple the maximum number of players you expect times the quantity you need of each denomination, to get the total chips you need.

Here is a basic 500 chip set for a .25/.50 one table cash game.

Code:

Denom QTY
============
0.25 100
1 200
5 200

For 1/2 cash, go with:

Code:

Denom QTY
============
1 200
5 200
25 100

1000 chip sets listed below can accommodate 20 players for both cash games and tournaments (with and without a .25 chip), or for a tournament set only. For 10 players, you can reduce each quantity, but you will want a minimum of 100 of every chip except for the 1000 and 5000 chips.

POKER CHIP REVIEWS
Before you buy samples, you can narrow down your choices by reading reviews on poker chips. These websites provide some good information, though some of them have not been updated much in recent years.

SOME POPULAR CHIPS
These are some chips that have been recommended on 2+2 by various people. We are not endorsing these vendors by linking them here. You should do your own research to get the best price and service.

Unless you know what you are getting, you should first order sample chips. A few bucks spent on samples can save you hundreds of dollars if you buy a set you don't like.